[A Death in the Family] should be read for its blazing account of a feared father set on self-destruction, the boredom and bewilderment of adolescence, and its flashes of sheet brilliance

A masterpiece... Meticulously detailed, harrowing, oddly beautiful, its depiction of a family’s disintegration is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I’ve read in years

The best book I read this year...full of artistic, moral and technical daring

Intense and vital...ceaselessly compelling...superb

This suburban epic, electrifying in candour and eloquence, feels streets ahead of the comparable Jonathan Franzen

Incredibly moving

A daring end to a brilliant series... I will read this series again and again.

It is hard not to be impressed by the fluency and erudition on display as Knausgaard charts his course through history, philosophy, literature and the visual arts… In the end, reality does not break down under Knausgaard’s gaze. We are left instead with the world as it is: the click of a seatbelt, the shock of melted margarine, the centuries slipping away in Rembrandt’s eyes.

The inner conflicts swirling around exert a gravitational pull on the reader, the challenges of empathy becoming universal through their particularity. Over and over, he asserts something fundamental to literature, art and life… these books will endure.

My Struggle just keeps coming at you, much as life does… Knausgaard succeeds in producing prose that is "alive", partly because of his eye for detail and partly because of the quality of his intellect.

[My Struggle] is arguably the most important literary event of the 21st century...it’s also worth reflecting on just how valuable these books can be. They are, among other things, uniquely candid about male shame, which makes them a highly valuable guide to modern masculinity.

The End is worth the wait… his life is now destined to stand in the shadow of this truly monumental six-volume literary achievement. And perhaps there is no greater mark of artistic success than that.

The “unartiness” is the most striking element of Knausgaard’s project. The impression of randomness and spontaneity… Knausgaard’s abandonment of fictional convention was particularly disruptive because he executed it in a realm where the strictures of artifice are most rigidly codified: domestic realism… Enthralling… The final passages of My Struggle are guilt-ridden and heartbreaking.

[The End] has a bone-dry wit, a certain knowingness about the project’s grandiose archetypes… [Knausgaard] laments the gulf between vaulting ambition and its haphazard realisation.

As you'd expect from award-winning Moran, this book is brash, razor-sharp and full of heart

Absorbing and ambitious. Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social-media dominated times, and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond sharp prose with barely a wasted word. . . It deserves to be on every prize longlist this year

For fans of Black Mirror

Millennial angst meets sci-fi

Sublime

An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending.

Luiza Sauma's debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work.

Her writing is beautiful. I am sure I'll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come

Rebellious and subversive... Williams excels at visceral descriptions of bodies and food alike

A bold and fresh story about food, friendship and feminism...compelling reading.

Bold, wild and witty

A small utopia celebrating the intoxications of female friendship and standing as a private bulwark against patriarchy

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Nation, published in 2008 (this year's award catchment runs from August 2008-September 2009), is an extraordinarily complicated tale about God, tradition and loss. Yet it is told with beautiful simplicity and rollicking readability.

Funny and profound, Nation is much more than an adventure story, pitting reason against religion and offering an alternative perspective on world history and culture.

As Pratchett says: "Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you." His wit is on every page; his world surpasses ours, his writing is weird and wonderful. No, weirdly wonderful. It is gripping but put the book down to ponder the thoughts inside to unearth a parallel universe. Terry Pratchett is worth more than his idiom; his teachings contain more philosophical thought than I would have ever thought possible.

A brilliant first novel

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

A dazzling read

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

Intoxicating

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.